The explosive growth of the Internet as a publication and interactive communication platform has created an electronic environment that is changing the way business is transacted. As the Internet becomes increasingly accessible around the world, communications between users that utilize different spoken or written languages increase exponentially.
Several attempts have been made to facilitate such communications and to provide translation software packages residing on a computer and configured to translate text or voice communications from one language to another. Some of these translation software packages, however, can be expensive and can result in a financial burden for a user of such software packages. Furthermore, such software packages require considerable storage capacity to be available on the computer.
Another drawback of the translation software packages relates to their limited applicability. For example, current technology allows for translation of text through common text translation software installed on a computer. The translation may be accomplished in a variety of ways, one of which is direct word for word translation of the communication, which is imperfect and produces grammatically incorrect sentences in the translated language. Current technology also allows for limited translation of voice communications through speech recognition software installed on the computer. However, spoken language translation is mostly available in restricted domains, where the database of recognizable words is limited to a specific set of words.